Kevin Myers: It's time to face the truth: we're not doomed after all

THE great global disaster has been predicted for decades now: the world is warming up, the mantra shrieks, and we are doomed unless we change everything. To doubt this is to become the 21st century version of a medieval heretic, in modernspeak, a "Denier"-- and political, social, and moral isolation await Deniers!

THE great global disaster has been predicted for decades now: the world is warming up, the mantra shrieks, and we are doomed unless we change everything. To doubt this is to become the 21st century version of a medieval heretic, in modernspeak, a "Denier"-- and political, social, and moral isolation await Deniers!

Little wonder that so few headlines have been given to the most astonishing news of the new decade -- the claim that most of the Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 is entirely bogus. The warning first surfaced in a popular magazine 11 years ago, and soon became a revealed "truth" of meteorological mumbo-jumbo. Indeed, it became so all-pervasive that even I repeated it in a recent piece on my thoughts about China and India for the 21st century.

Well, some glaciers are melting; others are not. It is, to be sure, unusual for a January day in Dublin to be 21.7 degrees, (71 degrees Fahrenheit) which it certainly was, not in recent years, but in 1971. We have just had the longest cold spell in Ireland in nearly 50 years -- and with another six weeks of winter still to come. Yet scientists in the mid-1970s were warning us of the imminence of a new Ice Age. And no one today is anywhere near growing tobacco in Warwickshire, as the proto-Players and Wills were nearly 500 years ago.

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